places like philadelphia or washington, d.c. or houston or providence, rhode island. those are all sort of coastal cities, too, in the sense that they are near the coast and they're on waterways. just for the sake of argument, let's not even include those. let's just be narrowly focused here, talking narrowly about big populous metropolitan areas that are right up against the sea. if you add up the population of these cities on america's coastal edges, the population of just this america is more than 63 million people. that means more than one in five americans, that means roughly one in five americans, one out of every five people who can call themselves americans, lives in a metropolitan area that is right, directly on the coast. a population roughly equivalent to all the people who voted either for john mccain or barack obama in 2008. one entire side of the voting population in this upcoming election is the portion of our country that lives on the edge. as we continue to cope with and rescue people from and now recover bodies from, the impact of this one storm on t